248 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 256. 



instances in which these "fools' arguments," as 

 Butler pithily terms them, — 



" Quoth she, ' I've heard old cunning stagers 

 Say, fools for arguments use wagers.' " 



Hudibras, part ii. canto i. 



have been resorted to, as to avoid recording those 

 which " the ordinary channels of information," 

 centos of anecdote, and collections of Ana, may al- 

 ready have made him acquainted with. The fol- 

 lowing, however, may not hitherto have come 

 beneath his notice. 



The celebrated epistolographer, James Howell, 

 after dilating, in a letter to a friend, upon the 

 wondrous medicinal and other properties of the 

 then novelty, tobacco, observes : 



" If one would try a petty conclusion how much smoke 

 there is in a pound' of tobacco, the ashes will tell him ; 

 for let a pound be exactly weighed, and the ashes kept 

 cliarily and weighed afterwards, what wants of a pound 

 weight in the ashes, cannot be denyed to have been smoke 

 which evaporated into air. I have been told that Sir 

 W. Rawleigh won a wager of Queen Elizabeth upon this 

 nicety." — Epistola Ho-Eliarue, 9th ed., p. 418. 



The learned Menage appears to have been not 

 unfriendly to this mode of deciding a dispute : 



" Nous sommes," says he, " de grands parieurs k Angers. 

 Je dis souvent, Ilfaut parier ou se taire, et c'est une facjon 

 de parier commune parmi nous. Je disais un jour a M. le 

 premier President de I^amoignon, ces paroles de Marc 

 Aurfele," &c. 



He then proceeds to narrate how he made and 

 won a wager with the President as to the correct- 

 ness of his quotation. (Menagiana, torn. ii. p. 362.) 

 Popular tradition has long associated the as- 

 sumption of the Ulster badge — the bloody hand 

 — by the Holte family of Aston, with a barbarous 

 murder, committed at the commencement of the 

 seventeenth century, by Sir Thomas Holte upon 

 his cook, by splitting open his head with a cleaver. 

 It need not be said that the assumption of the 

 badge has no connexion whatever with this cir- 

 cumstance, which may, or may not, have occurred : 



" The most probable tradition," says Mr. Atkinson, the 

 historian of the family, " of the cause of the commission 

 of the crime is, that Sir Thomas, when returning from 

 hunting, in the course of conversation, laid a wager to 

 some amount, as to the punctuality of his cook, who, 

 most unfortunately, for once was behind time. Enraged 

 at the jeers of his companions, he hastened into the 

 kitchen, and seizing the first article at hand, avenged 

 himself on his domestic." — History of the Holtes of Aston, 

 Birmingham, 1854, p. 25. 



Wagers to an immense amount were laid at the 

 latter end of last century, as to the sex of that 

 epicene notoriety, the Chevalier D'Eon. One of 

 these became the subject of judicial decision. The 

 cause came on, 1st July, 1777, in the Court of 

 King's Bench, before Lord Mansfield and a special 

 jury at Guildhall. It appeared that the plaintiff 

 had paid the defendant one hundred guineas, for 

 which the defendant had signed a policy of in- 



surance to pay the plaintiff seven hundred guineas 

 whenever he could prove that the Chevalier 

 D'Eon was a female. After hearing the evidence, 

 which was " too indelicate to be mentioned," Lord 

 Mansfield, after expressing his abhorrence of the 

 transaction, and a wish that it had been in his 

 power, in concurrence with the jury, to make both 

 parties lose, stated, that as the wager was laid, 

 and wagers were not expressly prohibited by law, 

 the question before them was. Who had won* 

 His lordship farther observed that the indecency 

 of the proceeding arose more from the unnecessary 

 questions asked, than from the case itself; that 

 the witnesses had declared that they perfectly 

 knew the Chevalier to be a woman ; that if she is 

 not so they are certainly perjured ; that there was 

 no need of inquiring how, and by what method, 

 they knew it ; and finally, that he was of opinion 

 that the jury must find a verdict for the plaintiff. 

 The jury, without going out of court, after con- 

 sulting about two minutes, gave a verdict for the 

 plaintiff of seven hundred pounds and forty 

 shillings. Besides this, the plaintiff, Mr. Hayes, 

 recovered three thousand pounds on other policies ; 

 and it was asserted that immense sums depended 

 on the decision in the suit. 



As this is a subject which comes within the 

 reading and knowledge of all, I will not now en- 

 croach farther on space which will probably be 

 demanded by other correspondents ; and conclude 

 with a reference to No. 145. of The Spectator, in 

 which the practice of laying wagers is humorously 

 exposed. William Bates. 



Birmingham. 



ANGLO-SAXON TYPOGBAPHT. 

 (Vol. X., p. 183.) 



It is very gratifying to hear that a man of 

 talent and energy like De. Giles, a "double first" 

 Oxford man, has "a plan for printing, in one 

 uniform edition, all the remains of Anglo-Saxon 

 literature." I heartily wish him success. In such 

 a work the Roman alphabet should doubtless be 

 used, for what has been called the Anglo-Saxon 

 alphabet was never peculiar to the Anglo-Saxons ; 

 but it was the character in which the scribes of 

 that age wrote Latin and other laiiguages. The 

 Anglo-Saxons, however, had peculiar sounds, and 

 for these sounds they naturally employed distinct 

 characters, the J', th, and «, dh, the former repre- 

 senting the hard, and the latter the soft sound. 

 We still retain both these sounds in the present 

 English, but we inadequately express them by our 

 clumsy th. Well might the eminent Rask say : 

 " The rejection of ^ and « from the English al- 

 phabet is to be much regretted." It must be 

 observed also, that the Anglo-Saxons denoted the 

 long sound of all their vowels by marks or accents 



